[WORLD PREMIERE] Legends do not die - All star

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| If you want to watch directly the video PRESS HERE.
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| If you want to download directly to your hd PRESS HERE.
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| A simple comment on video's webpage will be enough to motivate me :).
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| Thank you.
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Ladies and gents!

I've finally finished my project, after 1,5 month of hard work!

THE IDEA

The Amiga, represents a golden era of computer games. From time to time efforts have been made to visualize the impact it had on gamers. Various videos on YT (such as 100 Amiga games in 10 minutes) and video collections (Amiga Longplays) , include gaming footage or are consisted from fan made companies' tributes.
However, most of them suffer from:
1) Low res syndrome, that, that gets worse on =>19inch monitors' playback.
2) Excessive frame skipping.
3) Bad quality or no soundtrack at all.
4) Bad or no composition at all (footage thrown without consistency).
The above combination, literally destroys the image of the games presented. Especially us, Amiga dedicated gamers, who have passed countless hours in front of these games, can easily spot the difference!

THE COMPLETION

Having spent years behind joysticks plugged into our beloved computers, I've come to know most of the games by heart (like many of us). A lot of games had captured my imagination and I was always thinking about making a series of video footage to (re)present them, with the following in mind:
1) Cinematic feeling.
2) Video resampling to be compatible with HD resolutions.
3) Vivid presentation of the each game, meaning that the video would be designed by a gamer for gamers..

THE RESULT

The result can be found HERE (remember to louden the volume and activate HD playback).

You can also download the offline HD version HERE.

Video specs: MPEG-4 24bits/1920x1080@30FPS, H.264, BitRate~15000, AAC@256kbs/Stereo/48kHz/16Bit.

This episode was designed like a premiere of series, titled "Legends do not die", where as in the first episode we have a mixture from "All Star" moments along an introductory text.

NOTES

Please bear in mind that when it comes to video manipulation I am a complete noob, therefore do not expect a Steven Spielberg production! Frankly speaking, it was the first time that I 've worked with a compositor (Video Studio Pro X4), Video Effects (Adobe After Effects) and 3D (Cinema 4D) along with more software used. However, in the process I 've learned countless details around codec incompatibilities, software and hardware limitations. Nevertheless, this was a very creative process and I was getting the same feeling when I was opening, almost two decades ago, text editor in wb1.3 and let my imagtion take over!

CONTINUING

Although, as I've stated up above this is intended to become a series of videos (with an All Star 2 - coming next since I've deliberately left out a great portion of genres, games and companies, I am finding it very hard to continue, especially within this year:
1) It's very difficult for just one man to handle the whole project and create 4 minutes' long or more, of good quality gaming videos. Personally, it took me almost 1.5 month to complete it and it drained 100% of my free time.
2) The hardware I own (Core2Duo@2.4Ghz/3GB Ram), doesn't make up to my imagination and expectations! Countless time I've reach limitations since it was almost impossible to make a simple preview of my work or render, e.g. for 30 fps (1 sec), I needed 5 minutes of caching in After Effects, for raytracing in Cinema 4D, more complex enviroments/objects I would be needing around a week(!).
3) Countless software crashes (in conjunction with hardware limits), were forcing me over and over again to render a scene, which had already took me 5-6 hours, because e.g I was out of ram. These, repeated events caused my patience to reach zero.
4) My knowledge isn't sufficient to speed up the completion of the project. I was forced to read several tutorials, thus losing even more time, though I have to state that this was one (and the biggest) of the benefits.

FINAL WORDS

If you enjoyed the video, a simple comment on YT would be sufficient for a thank you :)


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* Btw, my respects go to the people behind CGI/3D etc, working in professional level. If one hasn't tried, can't understand the level of difficulty, in order to reach a certain degree of quality result. It consumes a lot of time and needs knowledge and talent (meaning everything that I lack of, LOL)

The video looks really great and even professional. I really like the way the sound works with the graphics. Hope to see soon your next work like this one. Keep it up.

Very good made presentation. Doesn't look homemade.

My only criticism is the aspect ratio of all of the gameplay is wrong, and cropped. So, while it is cropped, to fit 16:9 windowboxed (for some reason), it's also been stretched, so circles aren't circles anymore.

And also some of the cropping is done on the left/right too, for example in "Banshee" (even in the longplay video).

This is what it is supposed to be like: http://www.the-nextlevel.com/hosted/n ... ater/amiga/banshee_05.png

The Boing Ball animation starting at 2:47 is the wrong aspect ratio too, but the other way (it's squeezed instead of stretched, aka more height).

Nice video, keep up the good work.

Hi,

Very nice video. Good job.
I only have one remark : Some of the games (in the final) are showed too little time, I hadn't the time to see it or to read its name.

I am waiting the next episode.
YesCop

Very nice video! I love those old games and I love metal . Looks really good.